It's incredibly wasteful. The tech industry produces prodigious amounts of waste with a deliberate purpose (revenue).

Does the Jamboard cease to be usable without the cloud-based stuff?

Most cloud based items are like this by default, and by design. We throw the environment under the bus, to make our next quarterly profit.

Who's "we" here? I'm sure not throwing the environment under the bus.

That's why I'm asking about the Jamboard in particular. There are lots of comments about cloud-connected hardware in general here, and yes, I know it tends to suck. But the article is about the Jamboard.

Not sure where the 8 years number is from. It was launched in 2017 and CDW was selling it until 2021. That means some people have it for less than 2 years